Phaedra - Session 20

We're jumping right along to session 20! This is the main game I am running. This is not session 20 with this crew (more like 10 probably?), there's one other main group who plays a lot less and then a few different one-shot-ish games that have taken place.

I wrote about the first session here of this campaign here and hopefully I'll eventually write up the other 18 of them, but I am tired of waiting to catch up and am just going to start writing these as they happen. I'll try to lay out the premise of what's going on. 

This group finished the Black Wyrm of Brandonsford a few months ago and are setting off on their new adventure (hex-crawling their way to the Singing Stones from Wyvern's Song). We played through a few months of downtime where lots of big changes happened for the characters and they were able to spend a wagon-load of money.

The party, consisting of:

Freda, the level 4 cleric, Curate of the Church of Hekate and agent of the Northern Covenant 

Zelena, level 2 necromancer and her two Dolmenwood-bred hounds, Chaos and Mortimer (this player was not present)

Cassian, level 3 bard, accidental spy and wielder of an infamous pirate's blade

Winchester, level 3 magic-user and king of the Brandonsford Goblins (and currently transformed into a humanoid boar-like creature)

and their caravan of hirelings (an eclectic group of halflings, dwarves, and a few classed humans), their 10 hired guards, plus a wagon for their future treasure set off towards the southwest of the great dwarven keep of Ther Khuldir towards the Mountains of Chaos, where they hope to find Price Hessian, the adopted son of the Queen of the Dwarves and return him for the 10k gold bounty. 

The third (and mostly final!) iteration of my map. God I love hexkit, this turned out soooooooo pretty, I can't stand it.

This is the first time I've run any sort of hex-crawl. I stocked the hexes and built my encounter tables for regions using ktrey's stocking method (I like dense hexes), the specific overloaded encounter die from this Seed of Worlds post and using rules from Meandering Banter that is referred to in said post. I haven't stocked too many hexes yet so I am glad this session went how it did. All the work I did in creating this first region really paid off.

They started their crawl by performing some subterfuge at a local noble's estate (a key member in the old aristocracy that lost power when the great Empire was pushed out of the region 50 years ago), trying to suss out his loyalties and see if he had any information on Price Hessian's where-abouts. The noble gave them lots of into (a 12 on a reaction check) and informed the group of another party searching for the prince.

The first region in their journey is the Feastlands, settled but dangerous farmland that snakes around the northern part of the territory that the party's related faction, The Northern Covenant (a unified force of local halflings, dwarves, witches, and Hekate worshipers) are based out of. 

The caravan headed west across the great road, where they ran into two giant horned sheep wandering southwards. Cassian was able to recall his monster lore (using the Dolmenwood bard ability) and figure out that these were probably lost from a cyclops village in the mountains to the north. 

 Curious, they followed the tracks (thanks for the hunter hireling they gained recently) north, and guided the sheep to follow them. After a few hours of tracking, they came across a seemingly-abandoned farm field, which was strange since this was harvesting season (although I have a calendar with harvesting-related info on it, I haven't shared it with them yet so I just told them this was suspicious. This whole encounter happened because they rolled and got a boon/found a secret on the hazard die so I tried to make this obvious to them). They approached the farmhouse at the center and were greeted by a human farmwife.

One of their guards yelled out as two sets of five farmhands descended upon them from the south, most with bows but a few with finely made steel swords. A clash ensued, the bulk of the hirelings and guards fought a pitched battle against the farmhands. A well-timed fog spell from Hekate hid the caravan from view and hid the guards as they mercilessly took down the armed farm workers.

At the main house, the farm wife attacked Cassian with a knife as the remainder of her "family" began to arm themselves inside. One of the "sons" poured poison onto a blade. The party moved quickly, striking down the wife and charging inside. Cassian charged a young daughter, who was casting magic out of the side door, and struck her down (yikes, man. He is really sticking to his chaotic alignment here). An illusion faded and the young girl was revealed to be an elderly illusionist (I'm not down with killing children in my game honestly but I am not sure my group knows that. They probably would have saw through this feint immediately. There's enough children being murdered in the world right now, I don't want it in my game).

The remainder of the took down the family in quick order, taking the assassin alive. Two guards died in the initial ambush and two were on death's door, but quick healing spells brought the injured guards back to life.

After investigating the property, the party found a cache of weapons and armor (far more than could equip the dead farmhands) and intelligence (the code cracked by Cassian and his bardic skills) about current area and the names of some Imperial spies embedded in the local nobility and in the Northern Covenant. They also found a large amount of small coins in chests hidden away, plus a few potions.

The party abandoned the sheep and headed back to the keep, presenting their new found info to the Triumvirate, the leaders of the Northern Covenant, who had recently been falling apart internally.

Using the city-crawing hazard dice from that same Meandering Banter post, during the previous session I had rolled a faction conflict and happen to roll the Dwarves, Halfllings, and Church of Hekate. The party wasn't positive what led to it, but they witnessed a public confrontation between the leaders of each faction, who together make up the controlling force of the region. Unless the party was to do something drastic, this was going to have massive effects on any future incursions on the region from outside forces. Luckily, the well-timed delivery from the party may have saved the region from doom.

The party was asked to donate the arms and armor they recovered and sold the illusionist's spellbook. 

With a little more money in their pockets and their home region in more stable condition, the party visited a traveling fortune-teller (who only had doom tiding to give to everyone) and they went on their way back to the Singing Stones.

Just as they got out of the mountains again, their path was blocked by a huge boulder. Two huge figures, sun reflecting off their strange iridescent scaled armor and giant tusked helmets, called out and said they would move the boulder for 500 gold. The party replied and said they could come down and get it, so one figure began to make his down the side of the pass. Freda took this chance to instill the fear of her goddess in the one who remained up top, who was able to resist the spell. He yelled to kill them all, and grabbed a huge boulder from his side and prepared to throw it down.

And that is where we finished for the night!

Random notes:

- I only had rough notes on the secret imperial base they stumbled upon but it was too perfect not to let them stumble upon. Luckily I did have the notes of the size of the force stationed their, but no stats or anything. They also all were much less armored then they would have been if they were prepared, which was part of the fun (they were startled by the approach of an official looking caravan of their enemies on their doorstep) 

- This fight revealed to me that I have played enough old school games recently that I can just deal if I don't have the stats for a basic creature. I grab some random human stat blocks quickly and made up the rest and it was fine. I know what damages of different weapons are, what thac0's low level characters tend to have, and I generated the illusionist quick.

My quick battle map and other notes from this session

- What a fun fight! That was the first time they've had a huge force come after them. They also just wiped the floor with them too. They had much better armor and the guards rolled wild hits. 

- The cleric can cast fog due to her custom spell list, which I'll talk about sometime.

- I did have to just sort of make shit up about where people were and how far they could go. It made me want to pull out Owlbear Rodeo. In the moment I really was missing it, but thinking about how it went, it honestly didn't go too bad the way it was. Managing combat with this amount of characters is new to me though, it's a lot to keep track of.

- splitting xp and gold between pcs and hirelings with different shares (some with 1/2 and some 1/3) is my nightmare and I hate it. I need an excel document for this

I think that's it? Two long session reports in two days is enough for me for awhile. Happy playing!